Timken Museum of Art director John Wilson has been in town for less than two years. So he’s a relative newcomer who still has a few secrets.

One of them: He’s passionate about contemporary art.

“What I don’t tell people is I spend a lot of time looking at new art, at art that’s being made today,” said Wilson, a curator and scholar whose primary expertise is in Old Master paintings. “I feel the creative process is pretty much the same (for older and newer art). Even all the art in the Timken was contemporary art at one time. Artists now are just using different techniques, different media, different experiences to get to an expressive result. And it’s really fun to see what people are making.”

A couple of weeks ago, Wilson had a blast as the sole juror for the Athenaeum Music & Art Library’s 19th Annual Juried Exhibition. The show is intended to be a platform for local artists and is limited to artists who live, work, or have exhibited in San Diego. More than 800 works were submitted, and in the course of a single day, Wilson considered each artist’s slides or digital images, narrowing them down to the 72 works (by 35 artists) the public will see when the exhibition opens Saturday in La Jolla.

“I can’t make any generalization about the art of the community other than it’s pretty good,” Wilson said. “There’s obviously talented artists here, and I have no doubt some of them will eventually make it into museums.”

As is customary for juried shows, the works weren’t identified by name; just numbers, media, dimensions and the year the work was created. Wilson started by going through all 800 works, without eliminating any, just to get an overview. Then on his second pass, he made drastic reductions, trimming the field by approximately a third. He continued sifting through the remaining works until he had narrowed the art to a manageable number.

“Some things pretty clearly were not going to make the cut,” he said. “I look for things that — and let me find a way of saying this that doesn’t sound pompous, elitist, or whatever — have a sense of craftsmanship, where there’s a grace to them. And even if it’s a gesture painting, or something truly abstract, or even consciously ugly, it has to be true to what it’s trying to get across. Then there’s interesting use of materials, a good sense of composition, or anti-composition. I really am open to anything.”

Almost anything. Any artist who thought Wilson’s background might make him more sympathetic to still life or landscape painting was sorely mistaken. An immediate disqualifier for Wilson is painting that is derivative.

“I’m not real interested in that,” Wilson said. “You have people who are quite obviously individuals who set up their easel on a corner and paint the ocean. There’s another place for that kind of stuff.”

Wilson has nothing against landscapes and oceanscapes, and he loves his Old Master artists, but he loves them in part because they were revolutionaries.

“I don’t want somebody (in the exhibition) who might say, ‘I know how the Old Masters painted, and I’m working in that tradition,’ ” he said. “Well that’s great, but the 19th century, and into the 20th century, is full of artists who already did that. If you are going to try to work like the Old Masters, OK, let’s use their techniques and their materials, and their media, and let’s maybe think of a different way of doing that. Because using those materials and that media, the Old Masters changed things and made us look at art with new eyes. Don’t just repeat what they were doing.”

Wilson, who has a master’s and a Ph.D. from the Courtauld Institute of Art of the University of London, worked with Cincinnati’s Taft Museum of Art, the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas and the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Neb., before joining the Timken in 2008. It was during his Cincinnati tenure (1990-2005) that he started opening his eyes to contemporary art.

“There are a lot of people who deal with Old Masters who just don’t want to look at contemporary art at all,” Wilson, 54, said. “In fact, I was that way from graduate school until I started meeting artists when I was working in Cincinnati. I had a lot of friends who were working artists and I began seeing their work, and talking to them about their work and that sort of stuff. It sort of demystified it.

“That’s what we’re trying to do about art as curators. Whether it’s old art or new art, or whatever, we’re trying to make it so that people will come and look at it, and come with an open mind and learn about it. Maybe it will enhance their lives one way or the other.”

Wilson has no illusions about his choices being objective, or having the last word on a piece of art. He views temporary exhibitions such as the Athenaeum’s as the “research and development” aspect of contemporary art in which his role is to get some deserving works into the gallery for people to see. That is an important, even essential function, especially in an art world where the vast majority of artists are ignored (and often for very good reasons).

“I’ve had situations where someone comes in and says, ‘My father was a painter, we have all this art, what do we do with it?’ ” Wilson said. “I don’t know what to say. Come back in 300 years when a museum might be interested? It’s awful because people have poured their creative and intellectual energy into making this stuff and even if it’s actually pretty good, still, there’s a bunch of … (art that is merely good). It’s somebody’s life and I feel for them.”

At least these 35 artists will get some gallery time, and someone will view their work.

“Procter & Gamble will do a million focus groups and then the product will be tossed if it’s not flying; they are going to bury it,” he said. “The art world just puts it on the wall, and says, ‘What do you think?’ ”